Hi Premama, this forum does not seem to have many parents posting at the moment, just a few of us who were at the school long ago, so I don't think we will be able to help. I believe the usual answer nowadays is to search Facebook to see what you can find there, if the school can't help.

Katharine Dobson (Hills) 6.14, 1959 - 1965
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia!

Hi there, I’m a current parent at CH. We never had a bursar visit from CH, but I gather they can select at random, even for parents already in receipt of a bursary.

My daughter did spend two years at another private school and we did have a visit from a company that reported back to them for bursary candidates. I would imagine that the process would be similar.

During the visit, they looked round our house, checked out what cars we had, went through our income and outgoings. I had loaded our finances into a spreadsheet before they came, to make life easier to give quick figures, plus pulled out all the appropriate paperwork. They wanted to see, banks statements, savings, any shares, mortgage and any tied insurance, credit cards, pay slips, council tax, water rates, utilities, plus any travel expenses for work.

My husband had had a series of redundancies, we had moved to a smaller house, were driving two older cars, so we ticked all the right boxes, in terms of trying to cut back on our outgoings and rebuild our finances.

They aren’t trying to catch you out, they just want to check your finances. She commented to us that she’d been to houses in the past where they were clearly trying it on. One woman said she couldn’t afford to feed her kids, but had £50 of flowers sitting on her kitchen table and the same again in her sitting room. Another family said they had downsized their cars from range rovers, but had two brand new mini’s on the drive.

Hope it goes well for you. Get your finance info together, do a monthly Expenditure budget, it does make it much faster and if you’re feeling a bit put on trial (I did), it helps as you have everything to hand. Get all your accompanying paperwork out. They can now do credit checks, so better to be just be honest. DON’T get any fresh flowers!